


Common Ground

by jule1122



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: M/M, community: qaf_giftxchnge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-10-06
Packaged: 2018-02-20 02:24:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2411513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jule1122/pseuds/jule1122
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the 2012 QAF Gift Exchange for the request: friendship!fic If you could incorporate Brian/Ben friendship with canon relationship pairings that would be awesome.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Common Ground

Ben doesn’t look up from the paper he’s grading when the front door opens, but his pen pauses when he hears Justin yell, “Brian.”

He’d forgotten Justin was there, so caught up in his work he’d tuned out the sounds of Michael and Justin mapping out the details of Rage’s next issue.

“What are you doing here?” Justin continues.

“You were supposed to meet me at Woody’s two hours ago.”

“If you ran out of guys willing to suck your dick, you could have gone to Babylon,” Justin teases with what Ben can tell is false sympathy.

“There are always guys willing to suck my dick, but I can only endure so many amateur blowjobs.”

Ben shifts, uncomfortable with his own discomfort. He doesn’t judge; he knows what works for Michael and him doesn’t work for everyone. He has never believed there is one way to love or one path to happiness, but the casual way Brian and Justin discuss the openness of their relationship makes the part of him that loves Michael with a fierce possessiveness ache. 

He tunes back into the sound of Justin’s voice. “We’ve still got a lot to go over. The new villain. . .”

“Whatever,” Brian cuts him off. “Mikey, you better have some decent beer in the fridge.”

Brian’s voice is a mix of irritation and fondness. Without seeing his face, Ben isn’t sure which emotion is dominating. He grabs the notebook he keeps for class prep, and jots down “body language” and “facial expressions.” The words are capitalized and underlined twice; Ben hopes he’ll remember what he meant when he reads them.

Just as he starts in on the next paper, Brian drops a beer in front of him and sits down at the table. “I didn’t realize you were home, Professor.”

“Just trying to get caught up,” Ben pushes the beer aside.

Brian slides the bottle back over to him, and eyes the piles of paper stacked on the table. “I think you may actually need this more than I do.”

Laughing, Ben thinks about some of the disastrous assignments he’s waded through, opens the bottle and takes a long drink. The papers can wait, and he knows better than to think Brian will actually let him concentrate. “You might be right,” he concedes.

Brian flips through a few of the papers before holding one up. Ben sees the liberal amount of red splashed across the pages and groans just thinking about it. It has been so bad, so off the mark, he was half convinced the student turned in the wrong paper or was trying to pass off a seventh grade essay as college work.

Brian looks it over smirking the whole time. “If this is indicative of your student’s work, you need something a lot stronger than beer or a whole new profession.”

“If they were all that bad, I wouldn’t have a job, tenure or not.”

“Maybe Scott McDaniel will offer to blow you for a better grade. Hopefully he’s better at sucking cock than he is at basic grammar.”

“Brian,” Ben hears the warning in his own voice and hopes Brian heeds it.

“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen,” Brian’s voice is full of mocking disbelief. He looks at Ben intently. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t happen to you.”

Shame washed over him, he feels the weight of the half-lie before it’s even out of his mouth. “I would never. . .”

“I would,” Brian interrupts him. “If I were your student, I’d be under your desk earning my grades on my knees.”

“You wouldn’t need to,” Ben counters. He tries to imagine Brian as a student, knows he would have been too smart for his own good. The student who slouched in the back row, daring the teacher to keep his attention, but aced every test.

“Maybe not, but I would have thrown a few grades for an excuse to make the offer if you’d been my teacher.”

“When have you ever needed an excuse?” Ben tries to redirect the conversation.

“Only when dealing with delusional, self-sacrificing types who like to pretend there’s no such thing as fucking for the sake of fucking.”

Ben sighs. He doesn’t want to have this argument because Brian’s not right but he’s not wrong either. Ben’s lived both sides of it; he can see the truth in each of their lives, but Brian’s never given an inch on this issue. “My students are twenty years younger than I am. They don’t see me that way.”

“Idiot,” Brian scoffs, standing up. “Hey, Justin,” he yells. “What would you have done with a professor as hot as Ben?”

“Sucked him off in his office then convinced him to come home with me for a three-way,” Justin yells back.

Ben buries his head in his hands, not wanting to hear Michael’s response. He hears a thud and looks up to see Brian has brought him another beer; he opens it eagerly.

“His genius was always wasted on those morons at PIFA.”

Brian looks away, but Ben can hear the layers of meaning behind his words. He’s still trying to decide how to respond when Brian starts talking again. 

He slouches down in his chair, tone both defensive and mildly condescending. “If you don’t want your students to see you as a sex object you have to stop asking Mikey to talk to them about the ‘empowerment that comes from creating your own superheroes’ while showing them comics with your alter ego fucking your husband.”

Shaking his head, Ben tried to think of a way to explain it. He’s a writer, a husband, a father, those are his legacies. He feels no connection to a character that pops up now and then in Rage wearing his face other than to the happiness it brings Michael. “Rage is Michael’s, Justin’s, maybe yours, but I’m just a fan with a bit part.” 

“Michael told me once I’d always be young and beautiful. It was a ridiculous lie we both needed to believe.” 

Brian falls silent, but Ben doesn’t say anything; he just waits for what Brian is willing to share. He won’t ask, won’t ask Michael either. Their history is their own, and he’s learned to be at peace with that.

“Sometimes, I think Rage makes the lie true.” Brian stops and starts to speak again before shaking his head. “Not that I object to being remembered for supernatural sexual abilities, especially when I can back it up.”

“I was thinking more of how Rage manages to save the city between bouts of hot, supernatural sex,” Ben teases although he knows it’s close to the truth.

“Window dressing,” Brian dismisses with a wave of his hand. “To convince the prudes in the world there’s more to the story than sex.”

Ben lets it go, knows when Brian has given up all the truth he can in one conversation. “Window dressing sounds an awful lot like advertising to me.”

They are in the middle of a heated debated about the ethics, or lack thereof, in advertising when Michael and Justin burst into the kitchen still bouncing ideas off each other.

Justin’s face lights up when he sees Brian. “I didn’t think you’d still be here.”

“I told you I’d exhausted the entertainment possibilities this pathetic city offers hours ago,” Brian bitches as he stands even as he’s reaching for Justin, his face unguarded for just a moment.

Justin slips his hands inside the sleeves of Brian’s jacket, laughing and pulling at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll make it up to you.”

Ben shakes his head and tries not to laugh as they stumble out of the house, too caught up in each other to even say goodbye. He wonders briefly if Brian thinks he’s fooling anyone anymore.

“Sorry you got stuck entertaining Brian. I know you had work to do.”

Ben looks at the number of beer bottles covering the table and realizes more time has passed than he realized. He’ll still have papers to grade in the morning, but he doesn’t care.

“It’s fine,” he reassures Michael, and it is. There was a time when Justin would have stopped working the minute Brian walked in the door, or if he hadn’t, Brian would have made constant bids for Michael’s attention until they gave up on accomplishing anything. But he got a welcome reprieve from grading, and Michael’s glowing with the joy he gets form creating Rage. It’s been a good night.

Smiling, Ben pulls Michael into his lap. “You can make it up to me,” he teases before kissing him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to philflam for the beta work


End file.
